take alive the phone lines are now open so if you want to share your opinion argue progressive taxation and gun control as your question live on the air give us a call or two or two nine zero four twenty one thirty four now for the first call of the night todd in bakersfield california a to talk about taxes. yeah. those i question her is that i don't remember leona helmsley going yes only little people to pay taxes yes i remember the one well the rich are all of the poor pay taxes. yeah

here's my. history have history agree. that. the future is that the rich have never had to pay taxes. by a large. target of loopholes whatever. do you have time to get around that yeah well this is this is one of the big challenges a might might my thoughts on taxes are basically pay to play the more you play the more you pay it's pretty simple todd thank you for the call that people who are using a large people who are generating a large amount of income are also using a lot of the commons these are more the court systems to enforce their contracts so using more of our federally protected banking systems and our our currency systems

because they've got more of that stuff there they're using more of the commons and therefore they should be paying more for their share of the commons i also think that progressive taxation is a healthy thing because it establishes a a more equal society more egalitarian society and what we find is that the more unequal a society is the more violent it becomes the more mental illness there is the more teenage pregnancy there is the more as to these there are there's a whole long list of horrors that are associated with unequal societies jim in philly pennsylvania a gem you want to talk about wal-mart. what you're playing. by us made products try to store. america's small time. well now that they've they've killed off the engines to a large extent. and the price of oil is going up so it's more expensive to ship things back to the united states. and it's good public good p.r.

i don't frankly know what you're speaking of i have heard that wal-mart was going to try and buy more american stuff in. the our news last time didn't fill it up because their story. that they're going to start by product. and. thanks jim for sharing that with us it's fine with me i think that's probably wal-mart responding in the marketplace people are over it we've lost over fifty thousand factories in the last twelve years just diving just since bush one kerry bush came into office and people want their jobs back they want an affection america. in washington d.c. talk about reagan. i was born in eighty three so i was a little young during the actual time but it seems the more educated there's been so much spin put on by the republican party making such

a. big you point i'm wondering just what else. is purposely rebranded. about his legacy it's a pretty big topic there's a book called tear down this myth so i don't remember the name of the author but i came out about three or four years ago and it's basically a serious look at the history of the reagan era and the reagan presidency and it's really quite brilliantly done tearing down this myth and so i. mention of that and then you'll find out what you don't know paul in san francisco a paul thanks for calling. paul. and hi tom i'm calling because i'm concerned about the postal service and what seems to be the purposeful you know bankrupting of it. i heard from senator sanders on the efforts that he's made to. sort of put it put

a band-aid on but i believe that you know since the congress changed over from one hundred twelve to the one hundred thirteenth that all of those efforts have not died and that there's nothing happening that's going on to say to the postal service is there any have heard anybody talking about simply repealing the oh so closely jand the republicans push through in order to since begin destruction yes absolutely paul thanks for raising that topic appreciate that the for those people who don't know what paul and i are talking about let me just you know a thirty second or sixty second here history lesson back in two thousand and six the post office was doing really really well post office by the way is in the constitution ben franklin invented it before he helped invent america has been around forever and the post office was so. profitable essentially was showing so much surplus that they were actually having conversations about taking twenty five thirty thirty five percent of their car fleet it's one of the it's the largest

vehicle fleet in america the second largest employer in the united states behind wal-mart they were talking about taking half roughly half of those cars and making them solar or electric or both so i mean it was like some really cool stuff the post office was talking about doing the post office is also the largest unionized employer in the united states so when the republicans had power and bush was in office they said you know how can we destroy the post office right with number one they're talking about solar cars and electric cars. all this kind of stuff you know and the oil companies don't like this so the republicans are upset about that number two they're the second largest unionized employer in the states we've got a bust that union because those unions go out you know get people out for democrats so they passed a piece of legislation in two thousand and six which said that the post office had to fund over a ten year period the health retirement benefits for postal employees seventy five years from now i'm not making this up people who have not yet even been born the

post office had to have a reserve to pay for their retirement health benefits seventy five years to the tune of five billion dollars a year well that five billion dollars a year year after year since two thousand and six has totally sucked all the wind out of the post office sucked out all of that profit that they were going to use for electric cars now they're talking about closing post offices they you know and of course the forces that want to privatized it break it up turn it over to u.p.s. and fed ex there just have a field day so yes bernie sanders has been fighting the good fight to repeal that law that poison pill legislation that was put in there just to destroy the largest unionized employer in the united states and and i'm sure he's going to reintroduce of this year but you need to call your senators and call your member of the house of representatives and tell them that you support bernie sanders efforts to save the post office mo in college park maryland haymow what's on your mind and i. hi tom are you. wondering how can we get the

american people to finally come to their senses to demand a sensible foreign policy we're out there in the middle east while our lying. we can't even. we need to bring the troops home you know we have this trillion trillions of dollars and we need to do something about this now how do we get the american people to wake up to realize i think those of us who thank you for the call those of us who are awake and aware of what's going on you just are saying if you want to do nation building let's do it here as long as there is a kid going to bed hungry in the united states we should not be in some other country building building them or bombing them for that matter frankly unless our security's at stake and it's clearly not we were lied into two wars we need to get out of this quickly as we can in salisbury north carolina talk about gun control. right. i wrong and. you know

how it was. obama. i think you got your facts wrong fast and furious was actually started under george w. bush with by a different name and it was a row graham where they were watching these guns down in arizona they have this law that says that you can walk into a gun store and buy as many a k forty seven says you want as long as you state that they're for your own personal use and once you walk outside that store you can change your mind and decide twenty seconds later it's not for my own personal use and then you can sell him to narco traffickers and this you know and because it's a state law the feds couldn't stop it and so what they were seeing was that because of this insane law in arizona thousands and thousands of these weapons were being sold down to mexico and taken down to mexico so the bush administration started trying to track these guns when the obama administration came along they they flipped the name of it from whatever it was called to the bush administration fast and furious and ultimately some border guard got killed with one of the guns that

they were tracking and this caused this whole and at that point it became to the attention of eric holder and barack obama but this was not a program they proposed this was a continuation by the bureaucracy in the a.t.f. of a program that started under the bush administration you know their allies is trying to turn into something you know about it's nonsense it's political grandstanding kelli in elmwood park illinois birth. so i just have a comment and i'd like your opinion on it i'm still furious at hearing that obama is not and wasn't born in america i. this is true every republican out there if that were true what is that came from the cool. both of them spending millions and millions and millions who wins the election don't you think mccain would have investigated this and would have found out the real truth is that he is not eligible kelly kelly this is this is tony totally and thank you for the

call this is totally phony baloney argument and really what it is is it's metaphor a bunch of paranoid white people saying hey have you noticed that there's a black guy living in the white house that's really what it's all about that's the whole birth thing summarized right there in one sentence steven a diamond bar california i want to talk about taxes yes i'm really really surprised about the mentality of some of these people you know i don't understand it you know i mean you know if you do a little traveling you really really appreciate this country is caught with a country club dues to up america united states of america i don't understand why do they want to pay their fees there one think twice about paying the country club the us right yeah i'm with you stephen in the in the simple answer thank you for the call and the simple answer is greed. greed is what motivates the conservative john maynard keynes said conservatives are engaging the oldest philosophical.

conundrum of history and that is to come up with a superior moral justification for her selfishness steve i've been in woodbridge virginia and got a minute left what's up. forty seven percent of americans bought the bulk of them out of the employees of the wal-mart to make eight bucks an hour and that they still needs that are. systems on the other hand age biopsies that pump it up out step up so i don't think sort of people and i would say oh you know that she's made a movie ages are sixteen gold out of some seventy five cents and where i don't claim you know studio in australia ok maybe it would be a good idea to prepare some program on that subject yeah i think it's an that's an excellent suggestion ivan thank you for calling and thank you for suggesting that the fact of the matter is that if the minimum wage in the united states were today were where it was in one nine hundred sixty adjusted for inflation it would be between ten dollars and ten cents and ten dollars twenty five cents an hour and

that would be a huge stimulus to the united states that's it for your take my take live thanks for all your calls and if we didn't get your call tonight tries back next week. the worst your goal is to. wipe out six of the. radio guys and four minutes from the cricket. what we're about to give you never seen anything like this i'm told. the sun. let me let me i want to know why not let me ask you a question. here on this board is what we have in the bank we have i know you self-same. the issue is this money was spent staying

there again we're in a situation where the united way to talk about the surveillance we. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. not erasing day of the ball much more than a point taking a closer look at president obama's second term going to be even more more than even more invasions of our privacy can end monday january twenty first twenty eighth and bottom line for the president only on a. and

welcome back here is some things you need to know about working people are going on strike in new york city on tuesday more than eight thousand school bus drivers walked off the job for the first time school bus drivers have gone on strike in new york city in thirty three years and it's the largest bus drivers union in the nation the union claims bus drivers jobs are in danger as the city puts their contracts up for bid in an effort to reduce costs on average the drivers make thirty five thousand dollars a year with starting pay of fourteen dollars an hour which is barely enough to get by in new york city the school bus drivers new york city are facing the same problem as police officers in camden and sanitation workers in detroit this is made worse by those cities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy since wall street crashed

our economy and the bush housing bubble loaded everyone with debt now to get their balance sheets in order cities are cutting public services and selling our commons off to private corporations frankly don't like unions and don't give a damn about paying their workers a living wage luckily as we've seen over the last few years american people are starting to say enough is enough and are going on strike in wisconsin ohio and wal-mart's across the nation of fast food joints in new york city and as shipping ports on both the east and west coasts and as we know progressive change in america has always move forward by the efforts of organized working people. and one more story twenty six year old internet activist aaron swartz was laid to rest on tuesday just outside of chicago after taking his own life over the weekend at the funeral schwartz's father told mourners that his son was quote killed by the government and quote schwartz who was caught tapping into the mit network and

downloaded millions of online academic journals was facing as many as thirty years in prison and a million dollar fine as a result of an overzealous department of justice under this pressure and amid a long battle with depression swartz killed himself. on tuesday republican chairman of the house government oversight committee darrell isis said he will investigate the d.o.j. and linda schwartz in the past two years congressman i say has wasted taxpayer dollars and he railed president obama's about agenda with repeated which which investigations into things like fast and furious have been gazi but he's finally doing what he should be doing and that's looking into the d.o.j. extreme actions towards peaceful activists so as they say even a broken clock is right twice a day. it's

the good the bad in the very very hollow be asleep ugly the good steve chalke chock a baptist minister in the u.k. and one of the leaders of the evangelical movement has published an essay in support of same sex unions and relationships it is s. a truck writes we refuse to make room for gay people to live in stable relationships we consign them to the lives of loneliness secrecy fear and even of deceit i do believe that the church has a god given responsibility to include those who have for so long found themselves excluded this indorse from same sex unions is a big deal especially coming from an evangelical leader the bad congressman walter jones the north carolina congressman who railed against a library in his district for accepting federal funding to purchase more books some of which were about muslim culture jones told a local news channel that quote i want to treated fairly at all and i think too

many times the christian faith is not treated fairly they want to books about the muslims faith let them have equal number of books about judeo christian faith. well jones swears he has nothing against muslims looks like the facts and his opposition toward a few books say otherwise and the very very ugly congressman steve stockton stockton a republican freshman congressman from texas has threatened to impeach president obama over his use of executive actions in the gun control debate but that's not all so-called news last night stockman also made a mind boggling comparison comparing president obama just saddam hussein. obama was like hussein because they both use children to get their way politically comparing a man trying to save lives to a man who was a brutal dictator that it's very very. crazy

alert dropping b. beats bernie style from the most popular genres of music with the millennia old generation right now is dubstep a form of electronic dance music that according to music website all music features overwhelming bad bass lines and reverberant drum patterns dubstep isn't just for d.j.'s and party goers it's for beat loving birds to you tube user raney has posted a video on you tube of party music loving cockatiel he's been taught to belt out some dubstep of his own take a look. it's like are you might have a career and d.j. anyone say all you want to grammy.

is our national habit of eating dead animals dragging us closer and closer to a flu pandemic than could that could kill tens of millions of americans dr michael greger thinks so he's the author of the new book bird flu a virus of our own hatching he recently came on this show to ring the alarm bell he has this question. up to sixty million americans get the flu every year what if it turned deadly and the current question wasn't exactly rhetorical we do know that the flu is already deadly hundred sometimes thousands of americans die from it every year from the regular seasonal few flu which according to the centers for disease control has a mortality rate of about two tenths of one percent point two percent up or to kill

a severe and infectious form of influenza struck the world back in one thousand nine hundred eighteen infecting a third of the global population and killing as many as one hundred million people in the united states that flu took the lives of more than a half million americans unlike the average seasonal flu that we're confronting today which has that mortality rate of two tenths or one percent in one thousand eight hundred strand of influenza had a mortality rate of two point five percent a little bit hard to point five percent and it was the worst plague in history but what if a strand of influenza swept across the nation that was twenty five times deadlier than the one thousand nine hundred eighteen strain what if we were dealing with a flu pandemic that had a sixty percent mortality rate instead of eight point two percent sixty percent but here's the frightening news we already are seen on an extremely deadly and contagious form bird flu h five n one as already infected people in several

countries including densely populated china and indonesia as well as thailand vietnam and egypt among others. just as just in two thousand and twelve known cases of the h five n one bird flu in cambodia killed ninety percent of those infected in china sixty five percent died in indonesia the mortality rate was eighty three percent and in the lagos' and i jura the mortality rate was one hundred percent every single person who got it died if the sixty million americans who get the flu every year suddenly got this particular strand of the flu this h five n one and upwards of forty million americans would die it would be a disaster on a scale never before seen in this nation or you know other than possibly when europeans wiped out native americans when they first brought the original flu from europe and if it spread around the rest of the world it would make the black plague of the fourteenth century look like the common cold here's

a doctor gregor said about this particular flu. it's like crossing one of the deadliest known human diseases ebola with one of the you know most contagious known diseases influenza he added that the single factor that was the most likely thing to cause this flu to amplify and in fact that was bringing about this factory farming we should be doing everything we possibly can to defend against this apocalyptic pandemic get every day we as a nation continue factory farming and every day that we do that we're tempting fate . that's because the only thing stopping the h five n one influenza from killing millions around the planet is the h five n one flu itself only about six hundred people have been infected so far by this flu simply because it hasn't yet mutated into a form that can more easily in fact humans right now it's good it infecting the

particular viral receptors that coat the trache or the windpipe of birds it needs to mutate to better attach to human receptors but there's evidence that the strain in indonesia a strain in egypt or are acquiring slowly those mutations in fact in indonesia last year it was a hundred percent mortality every person that got the h five n one bird flu died does this jamming birds together in factory farming slaughterhouses and pumping them up with antibiotics promotes these mutations now that local small family farms and local supermarket butchers have been replaced by giant trans national slaughterhouses we've seen a rapid and radical increase in mutant strains of the flu along with other diseases that come from factory farms like the newly mutated and now deadly forms of eco lion salmon. we've domesticated birds for thousands of years it's really just been in the last few years where everything this unpressed emergence of these highly pathogenic strains which have killed hundreds of millions of birds and it's thought

that is the you know when we cram tens of thousands of animals in these cramped filthy football fields to be to be close now to us now to top their own ways it's kind of a perfect storm environment for the merchants and spread of these so-called super strains of influenza we've known about the consequences of factory farming for a long time now our national diet now has more meat in it than ever before us excel orating heart disease diabetes obesity and other illnesses that are responsible for increasing health care costs factory farms require enormous amounts of food and water and according to a report from the world bank's international finance corporation fifty one percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are the direct or indirect result of giant factory farms raising cattle pigs and poultry other words factory farming is hurdling our planet toward catastrophic climate change but so far these reasons haven't been strong enough to really motivate us to change americans and policymakers have been ready to move away from the factory farm model to bring back local farming and reform our diet by eating fewer dead animals but if nothing else the fear of

a worldwide pandemic that kills more than half the human race should motivate us to change how we farm and how we eat let's hope because whatever joy we as a nation get eaten chicken wings will be far outweighed by the catastrophe of watching millions of our fellow humans die to save the human race we need and factory farming now. and that's the way it is tonight wednesday january sixteenth two thousand and thirteen for more information on the stories we've covered visit our website thom hartmann dot com free speech dot org dot com if you missed any of the night's show you can now watch it in h.d. on hulu at hulu dot com slash big picture also check out our two youtube channel links at target dot com this entire show is also available for free video podcast and i tunes and you can do the download the audio podcasts of our daily three to six radio show and we have a free market i phone or i pad app in the app store you send us feedback and twitter underscore hartmann on facebook at tom underscore of our blogs message

boards and comment line at thom hartmann dot com and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag your. technology innovation all the developments around russia. covered. deadly rivals for decades. if good fifteen people killing each other in any other country there would be diplomats there would be a. self-imposed costs from society i will attack myself and michael attack my brother understand my. going to. the

cops of my anger and my frustration. that they are well into the. two most violent gangs in us history. is just all model killer to kill with the colors matching the national flag. of this country. when it reaches and then it legitimizes that. they are made in america on the oxy.